There Were Lilies, a new short story by Seán Kenny

At the scene, the usual scree of metals and plastics, red and white and silver and black. Crash confetti, Darren had called it once. And Ryan had wondered if he should laugh, and then half-laughed, and then wished he hadn’t. There are tyre marks. There are fluids on the road. From the bike. From Darren.

They were two dark shapes in the corner, Emer and Helen, Darren’s wife, in black dresses, both. Leaning into one another. Widow. That was the word now. Funny how circumstance could relabel you like that overnight. Wife. Widow. How people’s perception of you could tilt on the axis of a word. Emer had been talking to Helen for some time. There had been a good deal of head shaking. They had looked over at Ryan, once only, but he had caught their eyes and they’d looked away. Their gaze had flicked off to the side immediately, lizardy almost, he thought. He had the sense of needing to have something prepared for when Emer returned. Something broadly comforting that was scant on actual detail. Or at least diverting, failing that. There were lilies in the room. Something sickening in their sweetness, which put him in mind of flesh rotting.

‘Bloody lilies,’ Ryan said when Emer returned.

‘Lilies?’

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‘The smell of them. They always have them in these places.’

‘They’re a symbol of death.’

‘Oh. That makes sense, I guess.’

He sipped some bottled water. Felt its fizz on his tongue, listened to it. There were directions he did not want the conversation going in.

‘You wouldn’t like them, then?’ Emer said.

‘What?’

‘At your funeral?’

‘That’s not fair.’

He finished the bottle, said that he needed some air. Which was true. He required the outdoors, where there were no stinking lilies, or slow-moving people in dark clothes, regulating their occasional laughter, gently squeezing the arms of or hugging other people in dark clothes, or Darren in a shiny brown casket, which was closed and would always be. It was not the first closed casket removal Ryan had attended. Would not, let’s be honest here, would probably not be the last.

‘They all have that line, the riders,’ Emer said. ‘You knew what you were getting into when you married me. I’ve heard so many people say it.’

‘But we did, didn’t we?’ Helen said. ‘It’s not like they were ever going to stop racing.’

‘We did, and we didn’t. Who knows what they’re getting into, when what they’re getting into is the future. The rest of your life. Till death do you part.’

Helen looked up.

‘Oh, Jesus, Helen, I’m sorry.’

Helen gave a small laugh. A hairline crack in the day’s tension.

‘It’s okay.’

‘Foot-in-mouth disease. I shouldn’t be let out of the house at all.’

They laughed, both women, and a lightness came to the moment until it was swept aside by the endless procession of mourners, intent on their individual expressions of sympathy, replay after tortuous slow-motion replay. All that smothering support.

She knew what she was getting into. Emer thought about those words while Ryan was outside. Felt them roll around her mind, marbles on concrete. Getting into. Sometimes when you got into something it became a hobby or a passion. You got into photography or baking or motorcycle road racing. Sometimes you just got in too deep.

At races, Emer found herself waiting always for someone in a hi-vis jacket to come running up to her. ‘Ryan McCafferty’s wife?’ And for once she would not feel annoyance at being defined only via her connection to Ryan. And she would nod, knowing already. And Hi-Vis Man would say, ‘Sorry, love, you need to come with me.’ And she would not ask was he dead or alive, but would be rushed into a car and driven to some curve in the road, debris scattered everywhere, and men, always men, glancing at her, but careful not to look too long, and among the debris, Ryan, debris himself really, and someone placing a hand on her back and saying they were sorry, so sorry. And there would be pulsing blue lights and the broken mosaic of his bike, strewn across the vast indifference of concrete.

Waiting, always waiting for it. She couldn’t bear the tension, the taut wire of it strung across her days. She almost willed it to happen, the wire finally snapping, the black release of it. For it to take on a shape, something she could grasp. Not these swirling terrors, looming, always looming, out of reach, worrying the edges of everything.

It was a week after Darren’s funeral. Emer was washing the dishes; Ryan was drying. She turned towards him.

‘I’m meeting Helen tomorrow.’

‘I’m sure she’ll be glad of the company.’

She attacked a greasy pan with a scourer, mouth set, the white piston of her arm, scrubbing hard, harder. ‘It’s after the funeral and all the hullaballoo dies down that it really hits people, you know?’ Splashes of sudsy water were flecking Emer’s t-shirt.

He inclined his head downwards, shook drops of water from a mug. It slipped from his hand and landed on the floor with a wincing clatter, finally rattling to a halt on the tiles.

‘Well, would you look at that?’ he said, smiling. ‘Survived in one piece.’ He lifted the intact mug to rinse it under the tap. As the water hit the mug it separated into two parts, one of these landing in the sink with a small splash. As Emer lifted it, trailing a filthy curtain of dishwater, she turned to him, said, ‘Well, would you look at that?’

He shook his head, pursed his lips.

‘It carries on, Ryan. That kind of pain.’

‘Yeah. So you said. I’m away to work on the bike.’

He left the tea towel draped over an undried bowl. Shrouding the bowl, was the word that came to her. She had been haunted by such thoughts since the funeral. They came like bats, blackswarming her mind at night, in the morning, in the dead of afternoon.

Emer placed a hand on her belly. Either he hadn’t clocked her new nightly trips to the toilet and that her breasts were a little bigger. Or he had but was saying nothing. Which, she wondered, was the less bad of the two?

The first time that Ryan and Emer had met Helen was at a road race. Darren introduced her. ‘So, you’ve joined this circus too,’ Emer said, kissing Helen’s cheek.

‘Which of us is the clown; that’s what I want to know,’ Helen said.

The men stopped short of laughter but smiled at the corners of their mouths, gave one another a look. Emer laughed a little too hard, Ryan thought, a little too long. He watched the women as they talked. Their heads were bowed a little towards one another, he noticed, like question marks, almost. Or conspirators.

As the riders changed afterwards, Ryan said, ‘She seems nice, Helen.’

Darren winked. ‘She’s a diamond.’

‘She giving you any grief yet? About the racing, like?’

‘Nah. She knows.’

Ryan raised his nose, sniffed. ‘Get a load of that.’

Darren arched his eyebrows. ‘What are you, a dog now?’

The air smelled of oil and of rubber and of cowshit and of the fuschia garlanding and honeying the country lanes. It was high summer and the evening painted gold between the stretching shadows. Bikes were growling still along the narrow roads, beasts freed to roam.

‘What about you? Does Helen get at you to give it up?’

‘An odd time. She worries. Says her fingernails have never been right since we got together.’

‘Buy her an odd manicure, so.’

Darren was cleaning the tiny bodies of insects from his visor.

‘She knows I won’t,’ said Ryan. ‘I can never seem to explain to her, you know?’

‘Preaching to the choir, man.’

Ryan didn’t have the words, or he did, but they never seemed adequate to the feeling. The beginning settle of peace with the visor’s snap. Engines, Christ, the sound of motorcycle engines. That sweet roar behind him, around him, through him. The absolute silence in his head amid the roaring. The stilling of every other thought, every black rumination and doubt and fear. The hedges green, the roads dark and only left and right and throttle and brake and the next bend and no other thing.

Emer told him over dinner. He left his seat and held her. He lifted her t-shirt and kissed her belly. She began to cry, and he began to cry.

‘The pair of us,’ he said. ‘We’re an absolute disgrace.’

‘Speak for yourself.’

He laid a hand on the pale emergent mound. ‘When?’

‘Just before Christmas,’ she said. ‘The 22nd.’

He wiped his eyes. ‘Don’t tell anyone I cried. Seriously.’

‘What’s it worth?’

‘Very funny,’ he said, and felt its creep, its sideways crawl into the conversation.

‘You’re going to be a father.’

He nodded and took her hand across the table. He released her hand. ‘This is nice; is there something different in it? It’s more herby or something?’ He stabbed a forkful of pasta, held it up, made mmm sounds.

‘You’ll think about stopping, at least?’

‘It’s the middle of the season.’

She was blowing on her pasta.

‘When the season’s over, then.’

He stood up. She was blowing still on her pasta. It must be long cold by now, he thought. There was work needed doing on the bike, he said. She looked at his plate, half-full, at his face. In the garage he cried in the dark for ten minutes. He thought about Emer crying when he had that podium finish the previous week. Had the thought that tears are not always for one thing only. Not Emer’s, not his. He pulled the cord to light the single naked bulb and in the sixty-watt gloom replaced an oil filter that did not need to be replaced, or not in any mechanical sense. He knew by her shallow breaths when he came to bed that she was pretending sleep.

Ryan returned to a familiar sweetness thickening the air of the kitchen. There were lilies.

‘Not those things?’ he said.

Emer turned from the worktop. ‘Mam sent them. To say congratulations.’

He looked at her, eyebrows raised.

‘They’re a symbol of motherhood as well. And rebirth.’

‘Right. Of course they are.’ He wondered why people felt the need always to complicate things. It was the sort of head-melt made him wish he was on his bike, tearing thoughtless through the lanes. ‘You know I can’t stand them.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, her back to him again. ‘I like them.’

‘Well, I’m away to work on the bike.’

She turned and looked on the point of saying something. Then she returned to whatever it was she’d been doing at the worktop.

He was connected to the bike and to the road he passed along and to the blurring ditches and to the other riders and to their bikes and to the road they passed along, to their blurring ditches. There were threads holding it all together somehow. It was a tethering of sorts. There was none of the looseness of everyday life.

Emer poured a glass of red for Helen, ginger tea for herself. It had been a week since the coroner’s inquest into Darren’s death.

‘How are you? After all that?’ Emer said.

‘Oh, you know. Grand, just, you know –’

‘Yeah.’

Emer topped up Helen’s glass. There was some sipping, some silence.

‘So how did the scan go?’ Helen said, a brittle brightness elevating her tone.

‘Yeah, it’s all good. Everything as it should be, so they say.’ Road surface in good condition.

‘Ah, that’s great.’

Emer winced and rubbed her belly.

‘Is he kicking much?’ Lost control.

‘Bit of an acrobat, actually.’ Tumbled and vaulted into the air. Thrown to the road.

‘Sure, he’ll be here before you know it now.’ Great speed certainly a factor.

Helen sipped. ‘This is lovely.’

‘God, I’m gagging for a drink. Sorry. But I am.’

‘Sure, have a small one. What harm?’

Emer tapped on the bottle, chewed her lip ‘No. Better not.’ No presence of alcohol or drugs.

‘Is Ryan in the garage?’

‘What do you think?’

Helen drank a mouthful, swished the wine around the glass, looked into its blood-red swirl as it circled, threatening the rim.

‘He might stop, Emer. When the baby arrives. He might.’

Emer tried not to hold the hurt that she herself had never been reason enough for Ryan to stop racing. That their baby might not be.

‘Ah, fuck it.’ Emer fetched another glass from the press, poured. ‘Just the one.’ Ruled accidental.

Emer pulled another bottle of red out as Helen was leaving.

‘Here, take this,’ she said. ‘I don’t trust myself.’

‘What am I, the merry widow?’ Extended his condolences.

‘Oh, Helen,’ Emer said and stopped there because really, there were no words. They held each other.

It was a race day. Emer was sitting on the couch, two plump cushions behind her.

‘You sure you can’t take anything stronger for your back?’ Ryan said.

‘You know I can’t.’ She rubbed the white drumlin of her belly through the taut cotton of her maternity dress. She found herself drawing his attention to the presence of their unborn child like this often. It was an entirely conscious action.

‘Right. Well. I’m away, so. Wish me luck.’

‘Good luck.’

‘Thanks.’

‘They’re saying rain. For later. It could be slippery out there.’

‘Breaking news,’ he said. ‘Rainy day in Ireland.’ He got like this on race days. Jaunty with the nerves, as though he could swagger his way right through them.

She did not smile. ‘Just be careful, will you?’

‘It’s my middle name,’ he said. ‘I’ll have the slicks on if it’s that wet.’

‘Text me when it’s over.’

He kissed her forehead not her lips and he turned and she heard his boots stomp through the hallway and the rattle of his keys and the thunk and click of the closing door and then he was gone. Emer got off the couch and began to vacuum clean the floor. Every few minutes she refreshed her phone’s weather app. Rain starting, it said, in 21 minutes, in 17 minutes, in 12 minutes, in 7 minutes, in three. The vacuum cleaner whined. She had to stop. It had nothing to do with her back, which was fine, or as fine as a pregnant woman’s back can be. It was only that the machine’s grumble and whine put her in mind of nothing but motorbikes. She fled her thoughts like a bird alighting the dark branches of a tree, dark branches dripping blood, furious wings flapping, bound for the bright blue wide open, moving on, moving up, leaving the thought in her wake, the dark branches, the dripping blood. She breathed, and counted the seconds of her breaths and saw there would be rain, heavy rain, for at least 120 minutes.

Ryan snaps his visor, flexes his fingers in his gloves, grabs the throttle, engages the clutch, slowly releases the clutch, rolls the throttle and he is going. His slicks hiss along the rain-dark concrete. He leans, turns bodily into the road’s first bend.

Emer waited for his text to say the race was over. She counted to 50 before allowing herself look at the phone again. Then to 30, then to ten. She put the phone in another room. She retrieved it two minutes later. She waited for his text to say it was over, and rubbed her belly, and waited, with two hearts inside of her, twin engines beating on and on, faltering and ceaseless.

Seán Kenny is the winner of a Hennessy Literary Award and was named Over The Edge New Writer of the Year. His stories have appeared in The Irish Times, Banshee, Crannóg, The Lonely Crowd, The Honest Ulsterman, Ropes, Southword and elsewhere. He is completing a novel.